For the fragmentary uncoiling of the memories that he had of his childhood, director Terence Davies found with his creation—his stirring British landmark—Distant Voices, Still Lives a form that brought them to vivid and vivifying life. This is cinema as a high-order process of recreating what had been destined to make no sense at all, a mishmash of half-remembered things and yesses and noes and fears and images that sink back into the darkness after stalling beneath the speckled surface; the fragments dredged up by the memory are often indefinite, incoherent, at the very least incomplete, but with the movie camera Davies makes his own incoherence into something digestible, all…
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As if to indulge the glittering and fanciful dreams of the young, adolescent girls of the world—they’re out there, they’re hiding, they often can’t help themselves and really, I can’t see the harm in it—the long fluttering coattails of the gallant and half-savage Mr. Darcy make this man into a mythical creature. That long-drawn-out approach at dawn is so superb, so dreamlike, so perfect a romantic image that it brings the whole film to a sweetly quiescent ending. Mr. Darcy has been made by this moment, in all his rarity as the wild creature that Elizabeth has long been dreaming about; he is like a black swan scudding across the…
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Because of its adaptation from a play written by the Hungarian dramatist Miklós László, the screenplay of The Shop Around the Corner takes as its setting the wintertime streets of Budapest—at first blush a strange and even arbitrary location for a group of well-groomed and fast-talking Americans, all of whom inevitably speak the language of the New World. And yet even without this tidbit that gives some explanation for its choice of setting, The Shop Around the Corner has all the charm and thaumaturgy, humble as it is, to capture the attention of those willing to go along with the artifice and to repay them many times over. In retrospect,…
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The image of a charming twosome, slack and romantically engaged, each leaning toward the other in one of those countless Parisian cafés to whose notability the cinema has made a profound and immemorial contribution: it is Frédéric with his potential lover Chloé, a holdover from his youth having returned to say hello, to reminisce, and maybe to get something out of this long-forgotten friendship with a wealthy and successful attorney. And so it is—they are man and woman. He is there to enjoy the tantalizing benefits of a mistress without the guilt of infidelity, and she to bask in his gentlemanly largesse without the burden of a sexual relationship. This…
